nginx: reverse proxy panacea

A few weeks ago in Reverse Proxy Roundup I was evaluating reverse HTTP proxy solutions. At the time I had settled on Pound, but frankly it wasn't good enough for the load I expected it to handle. Additionally, spawning so many threads used far more RAM and CPU than it should've.

Not long after I wrote that post, a friend of mine pointed me at nginx. nginx is an extremely high performance HTTP server that offers reverse proxying, FastCGI, SSL, and even IMAP/POP3 proxying.

I have had precisely zero problems with nginx so far after about 5 weeks and hundreds of millions of proxied requests. Forget about lighttpd, nginx uses less memory, doesn't leak, and has higher performance (in my FreeBSD configuration, anyway).

The reason I didn't blog about it sooner is that the project is Russian and so was a large majority of its documentation at the time. With the 0.4 release, there's a much more complete draft of the English documentation available. Check it out; your high traffic servers will thank you for it.